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They measure (estimate, really) based on how many wallets/address exist on the blockchain.

Pretty dodgy approach though, because there are various services that provide Bitcoin "functionality" for many users with a handful of wallet addresses, or use many different wallet addresses to mix/launder transactions.

Yeah, difficult to correlate number of addresses with users. Ethereum is probably a better approximation since users there tend to use a single address for everything.

Another way I estimate usage/adoption is looking at Google Trends and comparing it against something I can use as a baseline (in my case "reddit"), right now Bitcoin averages around ~30-40% of search query volume compared to reddit [1] (and even more if you look at worldwide queries) which is obviously not perfect comparison, but is an interesting datapoint.

1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Better than nothing. A lot of estimates I've seen try to solve for these issues but there isn's a completely clean way to do it.

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